Greenpeace are cocks

xane

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Scouse said:
Perhaps you should take a closer look at, if not at Greenpeace, any organisation which only real vested interests are protecting the environment for the people of the world. Same goes for a lot of the anti-capitalist movements. I mean - they're not funded by chavs are they? They tend to be funded by an pretty intellectual section of our society. They're not trying to make money out of you..

This may have been true in the 1970s, but Greenpeace and other organisations of that ilk, are increasingly political. They may not be trying to make money, but they need political influence, and your vote, so they come up with scare stories to keep them in government.

Scouse said:
They're trying to do what they believe is good for us and raise awareness of issues that affect us.

You can say that of any organisation, even the most extreme, it doesn't make it right.

Greenpeace, as with most environmental organisations, are all of the liberal-leftist utopian socialist variety, they are normally found in the same company as anti-capitalists and anti-globalisation movements. They cannot accept that perhaps, capitalism, free trade, private ownership, etc, might actually be better for the environment than the failed political systems they continue to support. They may well be wanting "what's best", but when that flies in the face of their personal political views, they become a bit myopic.

The sole reason Greenpeace is anti-nuclear is they are full of ex-CND people who had nothing to do once the cold war was over. Rather than admit that unilateral disarmament was the wrong policy after all, they've simply altered their worldview and promote the same stupid arguments with an environmentalist angle.

If Greenpeace wanted a better environment, they'd support nuclear power.
 

itcheh

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The problem with renewable energy generation isn't just that they are (relatively) inefficient but they will suffer as an alternative supply as long as there fails to be a solution to storing generated electricity.

Nulcear power stations (and to a lesser extent Coal fired) can provide a more 'on demand' supply - whereas we're kind of held to ransom by the elements when using the greener solutions.

Imagine something outside of the predicted supply patterns occurs ... England get into a World Cup final for example ... 30 million people are watching the match and then go to make a cup of tea at half time ... there's no real stored energy solution to cope with that output and you just can't rely on a wind/solar to cope with that kind of demand.

I'm sure in time these green solutions will become uber efficient and someone will invent the mega battery ... but whether you like it or not, until then we're fucked without nuclear.
 

xane

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DaGaffer said:
The main reason we send our nuclear waste abroad is because no bugger here would allow it in their back yard. You can't blame the politicians for offloading the problem to the third world, British nimbyism was the 'will of the people' (for a change).

Not quite the case, a lot of nuclear waste ends up in Britain for reprocessing, mainly at THORP, afterwards, the end product needs to go back to where it came from.
 

xane

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DaGaffer said:
the only way Greenpeace's true environmental mantra would work is if 4/5 of the world's population suddenly disappeared.

I think they _know_ that:

Pentti Linkola said:
Everything we have developed over the last 100 years should be destroyed

John Davis said:
I suspect that eradicating small pox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.

David Foreman said:
We advocate biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake. It may take our extinction to set things straight.

David Foreman said:
Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.

David Graber said:
Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, is not as important as a wild and healthy planets...Some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.

Prince Phillip said:
If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to Earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.
 

DaGaffer

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xane said:
I think they _know_ that:

Oh I know, but their hatred of humanity isn't 'on message' (doesn't exactly win friends and influence people), so its not something they talk about officially; but given their views its not surprising that such comments escape into the wild.

Of course if they want to lower population levels, they could always start with themselves...
 

Tom

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Scouse said:
Just to be the dissenting voice - what makes you all think that a plane hitting any of our nuclear reactors would be OK? You don't seriously think that we've designed them to be bomb-proof on that scale do you?

Not specifically against attack by aircraft no. An aircraft is basically a tube of lightweight alumninium and a big tank of kerosene. Not really much mass, besides which its not as if the power station would explode in a mushroom cloud - they don't work like that. What you have to remember is that the scale of death and destruction caused by attacking a conventional target (for instance, a skyscraper) is much worse than that caused by attacking a Nuclear power station, which would be difficult to hit anyway.

http://www.parliament.uk/documents/upload/POSTpn222.pdf

I do, however, acknowledge that there are huge issues surrounding the technology - waste disposal being one

This is only a problem politically - practically, there is no problem burying waste in the ground. The halflife is much shorter than people expect.

The opportunity for someone to get their hands on our waste and turn it into a dirty bomb, for example, massively increases.

'Dirty Bombs' are about as much use to a terrorist as a piece of string to a man with diahhorea
 

xane

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Tom said:
What you have to remember is that the scale of death and destruction caused by attacking a conventional target (for instance, a skyscraper) is much worse than that caused by attacking a Nuclear power station, which would be difficult to hit anyway.

The IAEA report into Chernobyl concluded approximately 4,000 deaths over 20 years as a result of the accident, compared to 2,700 in WTC attacks, but it is true that a direct attack would never be as severe as Chernobyl.

If you wanted to kill more people, land a plane on Old Trafford or Highbury on match day.
 

Ultimate

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The video was genious!

Build nuclear power plant, crash plane into it, harvest the energy from the explosion!

Its failsafe!

Wel done Greenpeace for coming up with such an great idea!
 

TdC

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those who read Xane's quotes may also want to read this.

Tom, you say the halflife is much shorter than people expect. The half life of some of the substances in the waste is also much longer than people expect.

teh NASA said:
Nuclear waste contains a wide range of substances. Some have short lifetimes: their radioactivity is intense, but it "burns out" after hours, days, weeks or months (their hazard is different--see further below). However, some waste substances stay "hot" (radioactive) for decades and centuries, and their radioactivity is still so intense that they need to be kept away from human contact for a thousand years, maybe several thousand. At least initially, nuclear wastes also need to be cooled, because their radioactivity still generates heat.

It has been proposed to cast nuclear waste into a glassy slag and isolate it in underground caverns, but fears remain--no human activity in past history has required such an unfailing long-term commitment (toxic chemicals also may do so, if they are buried instead of destroyed). Luckily, the amount of nuclear wastes is relatively small. As waste products of nuclear fuel, they have about the same weight as the fuel itself, of which a few tons can supply a city with electricity for years.
Still, they must be handled by remote control, and must have no chance to contaminate ground water.
 

DaGaffer

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TdC said:
those who read Xane's quotes may also want to read this.

Gibbersish from paragraph one tbh:

Wiki 'Deep Ecology' said:
Ecology has shown us that ecosystems exist in a state of dynamic equilibrium, and can absorb only limited change by humans, or any environmental actor. Environmentalists contend that massive human economic activity has pushed the biosphere far from homeostasis through reduction of biodiversity and climate change. A consequence of this analysis is that the prevailing ideology of western civilisation is leading to mass extinction. This has prompted the need for new philosophical paradigms, such as deep ecology, which can guide human activity against perceived self-destruction.

The reality couldn't be further from the truth, the planet certainly DOES NOT exist in a state of dynamic equilibrium or homeostasis and has been subject to (and will continue to be subject to) sudden and dramatic environmental change irrespective of human activity.

Its really funny that the whole thing goes on about how humans are part of the system, not stewards of it etc. etc. but fails to see that the same argument can be made to say that human behaviour is irrelavent as far as the planet is concerned; Earth is nothing like it was in ecological terms 100m or 65m or even 100,000 years ago, and unless we actually blow it to pieces, it will continue to have an ecology, it just might not be an ecology humans will like very much, but 'Mother Earth' won't care.
 

Trem

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I like what DaGaffer just said.
 

TdC

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indeed. that's what Pentti Linkola believes, amongst other things. tbh I'm not too keen on people who tell me that WWIII would be a good thing and how people who commit suicide are helping the ecology.

sure, I'm quite convinced that Linkola loves this planet very much, but I'm not inclined to agree that reverting to a simpler culture (coupled with, say, 2 billion people dissapearing) is a good thing. us humans are here and now we have to deal with the shit we make. romancing the idea that a simpler state is a better state is very fluffy and all, but it's has all the practicality of a lead balloon. 2.000.000.000 people aren't going to dissapear. we aren't going to turn off our computers and live in tree houses. we aren't going to destroy everything we dreamed up in the last 100 years. so we have to find non-airhead ways of dealing with the shit.

now I don't particularly care where the power that runs my internet comes from, be it a windfarm in Norway or a atomic station in Germany. What I do care about is being able to play outside without having to wear a hazard suit and three headed fish not jumping out of a stream trying to eat me. in this case I am not too bothered about paying lots of taxes so the government can build decent waste storage facilities, research ways to re-use the waste, et al. as long as I can surf pron, get a tan, strange creatures don't try to eat me and not too many people/animals die I'm all for it. simple bloke me, really.
 

inactionman

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Easy way to deal with nuclear waste, put it back where you got it from! Those areas are (were) full of radioactive uranium anyway, it won't make any difference to the animal life etc there!

The whole anti-nuclear thing is a farce anyway, do you realise that a coal power plant releases more radioactive waste in it's smoke than any nuclear powerplant? It's surprising how few people realise that coal is radioactive! Or in fact that everything is radioactive! People love those granite work surfaces for their kitchen, but they are actually quite radioactive (made from volcanic rock), those glow in the dark watches/etc. radioactive!
 

Chilly

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inactionman said:
Easy way to deal with nuclear waste, put it back where you got it from! Those areas are (were) full of radioactive uranium anyway, it won't make any difference to the animal life etc there!

The whole anti-nuclear thing is a farce anyway, do you realise that a coal power plant releases more radioactive waste in it's smoke than any nuclear powerplant? It's surprising how few people realise that coal is radioactive! Or in fact that everything is radioactive! People love those granite work surfaces for their kitchen, but they are actually quite radioactive (made from volcanic rock), those glow in the dark watches/etc. radioactive!
It amazes me how so many people believe all radiation is the same!
 

Furr

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if only they could develop a viable fusion reactor all our energy worries would be solved








not going to happen though :(
 

inactionman

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What?? I did nuclear/particle physics at university, IT IS THE SAME! You get 4 types of radiation alpha, beta, gamma radiation and neutron emission, that's it! Alpha is He+ atoms (stopped by a piece of paper), beta is electons (stopped by about a centimeter of aluminium or equivilent), and gamma is em waves (pretty much can't be stopped, except they can be slowed down by a few yards of lead reinforced concrete, which also stops the neutrons).

Gamma isn't a big problem (although it's the one that tends to be the cause of mutation), as the energies required to make it are very high (normally requires the complete coversion of an electron into energy to make one), so only tend to happen in a reactor (not in the normal decay process of waste materials). You'd only tend to get large amounts of neutron emission in a breeder reactor (one designed to make plutonium from uranium for nuclear weapons). I hope people realise that there's a natural nuclear reactor that exists in africa (amazingly).

If you're burying the waste underground then alpha and beta radiation aren't a problem, the only possible problem you can get is chemistry, i.e. what is the decay process for waste elements, and are these harmful (harmful chemically, not radioactively).
 

inactionman

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I agree, although we'd still have to dispose of the radioactive structure of any fusion reactor with similar issues to current fission reactors (although a lot less obviously).

Fusion works (we wouldn't be here if it didn't), it's just we haven't cracked doing it on a much smaller scale (i.e. not requiring half a solar mass of hydrogen), at much higher pressures.
 

tris-

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woah, that video is pretty interesting.

looks amazing how the plane just disappears. i was expecting the other side of the wall to bulge or something.
 

Chilly

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yeah saw that film years ago when it was new. Consider it is moving at 500mph when it collides - that's a fair lick, not surprising it atomises on contact.
 

Wile E. Coyote

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Sorry if its old, gorrilamask.net posted it among todays webfinds. It did look a bit familiar now that you mention it. Maybe I had seen it before. Hard to tell with memory like a goldfish... :p
 

Furr

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Nuclear for the win to be honest, I would rather have constant electricity from one building that is a non smoke polluting source rather than have to put up with a bijillion windfarms and suffer from brownouts or blackouts.
 

Zill

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It would be catastrophic to leave ourselves defenceless when there is so much threat in the world because of the remote possibility of a plane being flown into a nuclear station.

Maybe Greenpeace are happy kowtowing to the Al-Qaeda terrorists but personally I'm not and people shouldn't be brainwashed by such scaremongering tactics.
 

Nerve

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xane said:
Solar energy "costs" more to make than it generates in its lifetime, the technology needs to advance a bit more before it can be considered "efficient".

Yes it costs more, but since the source is free that doesn't matter now does it ? And yes it needs to advance more, but I bet the technology would have been up to speed by now if it weren't for the oil industry...
 

DaGaffer

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Nerve said:
Yes it costs more, but since the source is free that doesn't matter now does it ? And yes it needs to advance more, but I bet the technology would have been up to speed by now if it weren't for the oil industry...

This is true in theory, but unfortunately you've still got resource costs for collection of solar energy and storage, both of which are relatively inefficient and both of which use some quite rare materials in their construction, which causes scalability issues with current technology. Solar will need some fairly revolutionary advances in materials science (nano maybe?) to overcome this.
 

Chilly

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The actual ratio of energy in to energy out for the whole process of nuclear generated electricity is surprisingly shit. It takes vast amounts of energy to purify the ore in the first place. The best thing about nuclear stations is that the fuel has a *much* greater wattage output per kilo than any fossil fuel once it has been refined properly.
 

xane

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Nerve said:
Yes it costs more, but since the source is free that doesn't matter now does it ? And yes it needs to advance more, but I bet the technology would have been up to speed by now if it weren't for the oil industry...

The "cost" is in terms of energy, if you've put more energy into creating a solar panel than what you get out of it during its lifetime, what is the point of having it for domestic generation ?

Solar power will advance, and at some point will become efficient, but not today.

Chilly said:
The actual ratio of energy in to energy out for the whole process of nuclear generated electricity is surprisingly shit.

I think you'll find coal, oil and gas are "surprisingly shit" too, once you've figured in all the drilling, refinining and transportation (energy) cost.

Of course, if you are sitting on top of a readiliy available resource you can minimise production and transport (energy) costs and make it worthwhile, in fact, the best cost ratio in the US is probably coal, and with clean burning power stations it is easily the biggest competitor against nuclear on both cost and environmental concerns.

It would be worth noting the UK is sitting on 100 years worth of coal, but if you think the Greens get into a stink over nuclear, wait till you suggest building a coal power station !
 

Sharma

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Yeah! Greenpeace would campaign for removing all coal mining points!


Oh wait... :eek:
 

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